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- Herausgeber: GRIN Verlag
- Sprache: Englisch
Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2012 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, , course: Global Management, language: English, abstract: “Si vis pacem para bellum.” versus “Si vis pacem para pacem.” For times immemorial man has sought to achieve a state of freedom from outer conflict guided by the pole of the above continuum designated by the Ancient Romans as “Si vis pacem para bellum”, translating as “If you want peace, prepare for war”. Those who deviated strongly from this implicit assumption by positioning themselves differently on the continuum and thereby reversed this logic were disappointing the mainstream cultures of their eras and were considered out-group personae non gratae by the dominant cultural players. This study shows how the dilemma could be resolved.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
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Gebhard DeißlerD.E.A./UNIV. PARIS I
A Cultural Strategy
Global Peace
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I
The Dilemma “Si vis pacem para
bellum” versus “Si vis pacem para
For times immemorial man has sought to achieve a state of freedom from outer conflict guided by the pole of the above continuum designated by the Ancient Romans as “Si vis pacem para bellum”, translating as “If you want peace, prepare for war”. Those who reversed this logic were disappointing the mainstream cultures of their eras and were considered out‐group personae non gratae by the dominant cultural players. Often they had to pay with their very lives for not honouring themainstream cultural value preference. The most revolutionary person in this respect was Jesus Christ form Nazareth who went to the opposite extreme of the mainstream value preference with regard to the instauration of peace: He exhorted
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his followersto “love their enemies”. It takes some analysis to find out the deeper psychological reason for this peace strategy.
One of the major psychological reasons for this 2000 years old teaching, among more eschatological ones, may be the fact that the subject that switches from the level of the logic of bellum (preparing for war as a means of ensuring peace) to the logic of love of the enemy instead performs a quantum leap at the level of consciousness by virtue of which he entersa new psychological level of consciousness that is altogether free from the dynamics of conflict. It is a procedure that frees man completely from his human conditioning and programming. From a psychological standpoint this reverse approach of “si vis pacem para bellum”, which therefore corresponds to the opposite pole of the above continuum, named “si vis pacem para pacem” is a supreme technique based on a deep wisdom and insight in the totality of human consciousness and the existence of man on this planet.
The value of peace with its two poles can be said to be personified by Christ as the incarnation of love and his Roman and Jewish judges two thousand years ago. The two represent two opposite approaches to the value of peace and peace building, one through love of the enemy(para pacem) and the opposite through the destruction (para bellum) of that which seems to undermine outer peace.
This may be considered a dilemma based on peace as a value with the two opposite poles and roadmaps to peace, either through “para bellum” or alternatively through “para pacem” or its extreme of love and forgiveness. Although it has the appearance of a dilemma with two contradictory propositions in the same psychological space with regard to the achievement of the end of peace, and which therefore, according to Aristotle, exclude each other, there is an important nuance to be considered that has already been referred to with regard to the teaching of Jesus form Nazareth.
The difference with regard to conventional dilemma thinking and resolution resides in the fact that one propostion seems to involve a different space of consciousness. By switching to another level of awareness and consciousness the “para pacem” (love and forgiveness) approachaccesses a higher, superordinate level of consciousness that transcends the ordinary mainstream cultural value preference with regard to peace building. And based on neurophysiological research, more specifically the neurophysiological principle of functional subordination and structural integration and its psychological analogy, which we assume, the superordinate space of consciousness‐based assumption of para pacem has a subordinating and integrating and thereby dilemma resolving impact on the subordinate level of consciousness with the value preference of “para bellum”. 6
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So, the value preference of “para pacem” draws on a principle of neuroscience and consciousness research for its physiologically and psychologically consistent effectiveness. It is scientifically based dilemma resolution that highlights a superordinate wisdom and knowledge of the nature of man as a whole.In modern peace research 2000 years later this complementary pole and value preference with regard to peace building is resumed again. But mainstream culture still operates as the conventional psychological level of consciousness that holds the value preference of “si vis pacem para bellum”, as did Ancient Rome and therefore the archetypes of Jesus versus Pilate, that incarnates the opposite values of si vis pacem para pacem versus si vis pacem para bellum lives on to this day.
Do players lack the scientific insight in the neurophysiologic‐psychological analogy in general and its application to the value of peace and peace making with its two value preferences in particular? Do they not really want peace in spite of all their declarations of theircravingand yearning for peace that fills the annals of human history? Can this strange concomitance and interdependenceof war and peace in human nature not be solved sustainably? Does man’s dualistic neurophysiology, in which an action triggers an equilibrating opposite reaction condemn him to live with this seemingly irreversible duality that displays,physiologically as well as psychologically, the dynamics of an eternal to and fro between the two extremes of pacem and bellum that takes the form of a pendulum driven by its energeticdynamic of action and reaction that cannot be brought to a standstill unless the biological system that underpins it subsides itself?
Conventional energetic, physiologic and psychological evidence seem to indicate that such dialectic is part of life and that it is inseparablyinterconnected with life itself. One cannothave the latter without the former,because the human body and mind alike are coloured in the dynamics of the principle of duality, structurally as well as functionally. If it were not for the fact that there is also a dimension of physiological evidence of the integrative nature of the human constitution man’s condition would be irreversibly coulered in the logic of dualism and conflict.
The key to the resolution of this seemingly existential dilemma is provided by the neurophysiological principle of functional subordination and structural integration. The access to the superordinate level of the space of consciousness to the space of consciousness in which para bellum and para pacem seem to mutually exclude each other seems to have aliberating impact from the logic of para bellum. It constitutes a revolution of consciousness which has not been fully realized by man although its
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workings have been demonstrated 2000 years ago and replicated by certain degrees by outstanding historical personalities.
Mainstream Western culture aswell as other cultures try to reconcile the dilemma of peace making at best by what is called the policy of the carrot and the stick. Yet, with the sword of Damocles of bellum suspended above any strategic and diplomatic moves as an ultimate threat for noncompliance there is no substantial change of the actual nature of the para bellum value preference and approach and the carrot approach may only soothe the feelings of guilt of a human consciousness that is aware of a another dynamic that it is hot ready to heed.
The para bellum approach to peace making has dominated human history and resulted in endless conflicts involving mankind across time and space and has reached its climax in the nuclear doctrine of deterrence based on multiple mutually assured destruction capabilities. So the para bellum approach to peace building has reached an extreme that has abolished its own feasibility due its utter destructiveness of mankind a large, whatever its values.
Here, in the face of a qualitative change of its logic that can turn against the author who professes and practices the value of para bellum, the mind becomes speechless and silent. In this state where conventional logic no longer applies (the more one prepares for war the more one deters an enemy from threatening peace), there is a possibility for a qualitative change of consciousness that no longer considers the logic of para bellum as delivering what it was meant to, i. e. assuring peace.
Due to the suspension of conventional thinking, the conventional mental space of consciousness may be transcended and a superordinate space of consciousness may dawn that first starts thinking in categories of disarmament because what was logical and purposeful has turned out to be the opposite and thereforeirrational. And additionally the opposite value assumption towards the objective of achieving peace appears at a now wider horizon of human consciousness that covers the complementary assumptions and perspectives with regard to peace building.
Peace research and proactive peace building appear in the wider human space of consciousness that is unfolding progressively. A metaphorical complementarity theory of peace building has emerged that more completely describes the logic of war and peace and provides deeper insight in the nature and feasibility of peace that draws on a wider space of mind and consciousness and by virtue of this fact the psychological analogy of the physiological functional subordination principle can
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beleveraged and solve the dilemma of war and peace, i.e. peace through war versus peace through peace.
And the consciousness which has realized the opposite pole of the peace through war assumption, which isthe peace through peace asssumption, tends to externalize its state of mind and consciousness and thereby creatively bring about peace without war and thereby cuts the Gordian knot of peace through war by pioneering a vaster space of awareness and consciousness with its beneficial impact on human affairs. This reasoning is based on neurophysiology and the notions of the quantum cultural principle that can help scientifically‐minded modern man to step out of millennia old assumption of si vis pacem para bellum that hold mankind in its firm grip since times immemorial to the very present.
In the way described above the value of peace that constitutes a continuum with two opposite approaches to bringing about peace can be realized non‐destructively against mainstream cultural assumptions based on a scientifically consistentresolution of the seemingly irreconcilable dilemma.
If one can achieve the objective of embedding the diverse human activities social, business, political, scientific in this wider human context of a more wholistic consciousness provided by human nature ‐ maybe teleologically for the resolution of the obstacles towards higher evolution of man - the diverse human activities can become similarly peaceful, whole and therefore far more fruitful.
The following part on the review and upgrade of the intercultural paradigm derives the above consciousness‐based logic transculturally and transdisciplinarily. This study is followed by various applications of the enhanced inter‐ and transcultural paradigm‐ Among them are the following five:
The Dawn of an Intercultural Metascience. An Epistemological Blueprint for 360° Synergy
Global Culture Systems Analysis. Sustainability and Accountabilit
Transnational Management
Global Negotiatons Management
The Conquest of Transcultural Intelligence
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“The Dawn of an intercultural metascience.An Epistemological Blueprint for 360° Synergy shows how dilemma theory and dilemma resolution can be enhanced by it and the review of negotiation theory shows how negotiations can similarly benefit. The latter, for example,can thus become the instrument of choice for high‐level conflict resolution and prevention that can henceforth prevent unnecessary waste of human, financial and material resources at a global scale:A Pentagon for negotiation complementing a pentagon for military strategy, where the capabilities of the former are the ultima ration, while the capabilities of the latter become the world‐wide standard for conflict prevention and resolution. Once the metaphorical cultural complementarity principle for conflict prevention and peace building has impacted the human mind in can free man from an age‐old stumbling block considered insurmountable by conventional assumptions and realize more of what the teaching of Christ has been starting 2000 years ago and which one can now underpin more scientifically.
To the management community the transcultural approach shows how the entire managerial psychological edifice can be enhanced structurally and functionally and how diversity challenges can be naturally integrated in a superordinate psycho‐ physiological logic; a logic of enhanced consciousness with it potentially creative and integrative dynamics.
The enhanced culture‐strategic construct can be applied and customized in the diverse spheres of human existence and bring about the integrity of creation and man: a new civilizationand this not through”bellum” but through “pax”.
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Nosce te ipsum ‐ Γνῶθισεαυτόν‐Conócete a ti mismo! ‐ Know thyself!
(Socrates)
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1
The State‐of‐the‐Art of the Intercultural
NATOhas contributed its share to the liberation of Libya. It is not yet sure, whether, from the western standpoint, that is liberation into the past or into the future, as the introduction of a form of Islamic law has also been announced. Culture and religion are important components of culture indeed and seem to be stronger than presumed attractiveness of western ideology. Exactly a fortnight ago media have been reporting about an escalating demonstration by Coptic Christians in Cairo which has caused a considerable number of victims, which has, however, been trivialized by some media by presenting it as business as usual in this part of the world. And as if I was not enough, the seismic changes of the Arab spring, which also involves Syria and other nations of the Maghreb and the Mashreg, culminates so far in a strong physical earthquake today in Turkey. The Euro crisis and the sword of Damocles of a global financial crisis are again threatening to strike and “Boycott Wall Street” movements in culturally diverse forms question the legitimacy of the global financial system. The gaps between the haves and the have‐nots as well as the cultural gaps between 12
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players are seemingly widening to such an extent that the geological earth drifts apart as much as the social world. And this fragmentation and antagonizing atomization seems to have its cause in a divisive force in the human psyche which should be looked at in search of a remedy for the ongoing externalization of division with its logic of conflict. It raises the questions of integrative forces in man to counterbalance divisive forces. The spirit of division in many shapes and forms seems to prevail over the spirit of unity, from the local to the global, from the personal to a worldwide scale. Is that the shadow of today’s technologically feasible global integration? However, conditioned separation and division as well as a priori given essential unity of man are both aspects of man. When this complementary reality is lost out of sight dysfunctionalities occur in the organism of humanity. So the question seems to arise how this lopsided prioritization of human anthropological reality can be rebalanced, how the game of the perennial centrifugal and centripetal forces in many garbs can be harmonized and reintegrated. More culturally andabstractly speaking the question arises, how the integration and reconciliation of myriads of singular forms and shapes and types of human diversity on the one hand and their essential unity as members of humanity on the other hand can be realized. The realization of the complementary synergetic function of both aspects of man’s constitution has a naturally conflict preventative impact, because the natural divisive forces are contained by the natural integrative forces. The perception of the whole has a controlling function, an integrative and pacifying impact within and as a consequence also without. Deficits with regard to the perception of this reality as an interdependent whole,whichresults from socialization as much as cultural conditioning ‐ in fact it is part of fundamental overall human conditioning of man across cultures and civilizations‐ lead to a structural and functional imbalance of man that is counterproductive to the development of humanity from a diverse human species to a solidary human family with all its diversity. In the following we want to focus our attention on the contribution of intercultural research to the correction of this state of affairs in order to complement
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presumable deficits in intercultural theory and practice in view of enhanced global management. Not presumptuousness moves and motivates such a lofty perspective but rather the need to address a presumed core issue of human affairs. And unity is not a form of vague idealism but rather a functional aspect of the human.
A parabolic story in which an individual is looking for an object in the light of a lantern can be considered symbolic of mainstream intercultural research. When a passer‐by asks the searching individual where exactly he has lost the object, the latter answers that it must havebeen a little further away, whereupon the puzzled passer‐ by further asks why he was not looking where he assumes he has lost the object in question. The searcher answered that he was looking here in the light of the lantern because the visibility was better in the light of the lantern.
Some intercultural research does not seem unlike the search of the lost item in our didactic, parabolic anecdote, as there seems to be a tendency to enquire within the known, rather than exploring new horizons that might cast a new, creative light on the object the research. While, for example,quantified sophistication is certainly legitimate and may provide precious insights and meet a human need for formula‐ like certainty based on specific numbers without ambiguity it does not necessarily mean that the researcher leaves the already charted territory of the known and comes closer to the destination aimed at by the pioneers of true intercultural research, which consists, so to speak, in the realization of a form of cultural Eldorado in the sense that man may reach masterhood in the control of the ambivalence of the culture variable with its divisive as well as its integrative and synergistic potentiality alike in this era of globalization with its increasing cultural challenges across the world as we have seen and said in the few introductory examples that epitomize the state of the world.
A quantum‐cultural reading of cultural and intercultural reality suggests that specific data of cultures need to be complemented by the complementary momentum of cultures. It fulfills the metaphorical imperative of the complementarity principle 14
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Niels Bohr’s as well as of the insight gained from Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Both together allow us to view culture from two complementary angles and to state about the integration of the two optics: On the one hand there is the specific world of cultures with specific cultural data and coordinates based on empirical intercultural research, while the complementary optic is that of their wave dynamic and momentum. In order to integrate the two and to describe culture and its dynamics holistically, one has to leverage a neurophysiological analogy of twofold structural and functional integration. Not doing so means lagging behind scientific paradigms in the sense that the particle approach to cultures, where each culture is attributed a particular numerical position needs to be complemented by its dynamic momentum. The former tends to be more static, is classificatory and divisive per se, while the latter is dynamic and integrative. Both together constitute the more complete cultural reality that performs better globally in business management and politics alike and therefore needs to be leveraged in our time of increasing globalization challenges.
Quantum physics has not only allowed outer space conquest but it can also enable inner space conquest with the totality of its cultural conditioning. In other words the intercultural aquis (research output), as I shall try to show, needs to be complemented by the transcultural approach, which is a metaphorical application of the microphysics paradigm that has been inaugurated as long as a century ago already. Therefore it is high time to translate this epistemological breakthrough discovery as far as possible to the sociocultural domain as well.
The hope that global business, global communications and transportation infrastructure against the backdrop of an even wider scaled space research, in short, that advanced technology would also bring about the cultural integration of the planet and would complete the technically feasible global village socioculturally as well remained unfulfilled so far. On the contrary, rather than peacefully and solidarily, as in olden days but in new forms, draw the vital resources from the common wellsprings of the one village, in a spirit of worldwide interdependence and
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therefore solidary unity, we are in a process of technological convergence paralleled by cultural divergence. Some indicators for the drifting apart of the world, albeit coupled with the quest for the realization of synergy potentials in transnational managementare, for example, that the perceived multicultural threat to the integrity of cultural identity in transnational organizational environments can lead to defensive, ethnocentric attitudes and behaviours that are humanly divisive rather than integrative. In some urban environments there is, in addition to the understandable need of cultural solidarity within foreign cultural environments, a trend to cultural ghettoization, which again is divisive rather than integrative. And in geopolitics and the economy, as one can deduce from the Euro crisis and thatof the global financial system for example, there is a trend to undermine the integrative acquis of decades of integration policy by multilayered national cultural interests based divisive behaviours. National and supranational identities need further reconciliation and integration while obviously safeguarding cultural uniqueness as the basis for intercultural synergies, in the interest of a sustainable future at large. The game of the two fundamental forces - as in physics -, those that weld mankind together and those that rip it apart seem to have mankind in their grip as much as the gravitational and the antigravitational pull in nature. And when imbalances become too strong seismic change occurs as much in society as in nature. That leads to cyclical catharsis for the recovery of the balance of centrifugal‐centripetal forces in diverse domains and shapes.
Half of the wars waged during the past decades were apparently motivated by the struggle for water and land and the two can be subsumed as the competition for food, as both resources together enable the resulting resource of food or in their absence lead to a lack of it and thereby undermine survival. Then the ensuing question of survival may be connected to deeply rooted and at times irrational motives like that of cultural overidentification for the sake of presumed insurance of survival - which may of course backfire and cause destruction of self an others alike -which may be difficult to control. Culture and its management‐dependent 16
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ambivalence are at risk of becoming a focus of power and identity processes in the competition for food and the survival of cultural groups increasing in number and size that might be tempted to use and play the card of cultural identity in the power game about the access to resources. Culture and survival issues might therefore be at risk of forming a not so holy alliance in view of the future of humanity with its likely challenges. But in spite of this projected negative scenario that involves culture, that latter, if properly and more thoroughly understood can nevertheless also be a potential factor of integration of the planet as a whole. This dichotomy and its effective management in the interest of man is a tenor of this study. Whether culture plays the role of a factor of integration or of disintegration of mankind at its diverse scales and in its multilayered human contexts depends on the depth of its understanding and its management in the light of such enhanced insight with practical relevance.
From this vantage point one may ask whether the cultural question has been posed comprehensively enough, so as to lead to complete answers that involve the root causes of cultural processes whose understanding allows the sustainable management of culture. For, as long as one does not manage to penetrate to the root of culture and understands its rationale in depth one will keep turning in circles and gilding the cage the culture gurus have designed, assuming that one has achieved masterhood over cultural issues, without, however, ever finding the actual key that would allow one to open that golden cage and to access the path towards freedom in the sense of a more comprehensive management and control of the key cultural variable within man’s psychological constitution.
The well‐known North American architect Frank Lloyd Wright was framing his architectural design challenge as the need of “cracking the box”, so as to integrate the structure with the environment in a new way. Well the intercultural box and the architectural box may indeed be likened, as both seem to require a wider and better
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performing contextualization in a wider whole that provides more sense and purpose.
